He's just dumb

He's just dumb

by digby






Jonathan Chait on the president being cleared of charges of mental deterioration:


A recent Washington Post story chronicled the rise of Kevin McCarthy, the House majority leader, who has gained special influence with President Trump. McCarthy’s methods include obsequiousness, attention to detail, and an ability to bring the discussion down to a sub-literate level so Trump can follow it. At Camp David, McCarthy gave a presentation on the midterm elections. “According to two people familiar with the presentation, Trump appreciated McCarthy’s use of pictures and charts rather than a memo. It was a basic and ‘foundational’ presentation that explained midterm politics to Trump, in the words of one senior White House official.”

Note that McCarthy was not walking the president through a complex technical policy requiring expertise in a field like science or economics. He was trying to explain the elections. He had to use pictures. It has been publicly known since last year that Trump cannot read a memo longer than a page, and any written material must be in bullet-point form. Trump himself admitted (or bragged) a year and a half ago that he does not read. “I never have. I’m always busy doing a lot. Now I’m more busy, I guess, than ever before.” By this point it is simply taken as a matter of course that people wishing to communicate with the president must treat him as though he is suffering a severe mental impairment.

Trump is not actually suffering a severe mental impairment. White House doctor Ronny Jackson, who has served in the post since 2013, informed reporters on Wednesday that the president is in fine physical and mental health. The report comes as the national media has discussed whether Trump’s functional near-illiteracy, minuscule attention span, and narcissistic pathos are the symptoms of dementia or some other kind of cognitive incapacitation. We should take Jackson’s diagnosis at face value. Trump is just an idiot.

Personally, I never bought the idea that there was ever a more intelligent Trump and it's just age that's made him incapable. People point to his older videos and show that he sounded more fluent and had a better vocabulary. I don't see it. He looked more normal, he sounded younger, but if you stop to actually listen to what he is saying rather than the sound of his younger voice, you'll see that he was just as much of an imbecile then. In fact, he said exactly the same things. He has never evolved even a tiny bit from what he thought back in the 1980s. He was shallow and arrogant and completely full of shit, blathering on stupidly about crime, foreigners (who are always "laughing at America") under-funding the military yadda, yadda. In recent years he got on the Muslim and immigration train but that's just an extension of his inherent xenophobia and racism.

He hasn't changed. He's always been a fucking moron.


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